On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
>It is not that different from German in this matter.
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
> Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language.
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!
That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same:
Λ Л
Δ Д
Κ К
The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
"Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
"кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
> "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
It’s fine as an occasional stylistic choice, but using it repeatedly as a regular synonym for brown is a pragmatic and collocational error. The meaning is clear, but the wording is marked, and overuse makes the speech sound odd in everyday contexts.
Uh huh. Don't forget "aliceblue" and "rebeccapurple." But seriously, those are just arbitrary marketing aliases, aren't they. I remember e-shopping for sneakers, and every brand's "off-white" was a different color.
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct?
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
Romance languages have more verb tenses. I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.
Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.
A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?
I am sorry, due to the war, I cannot see this in good faith. I am Dutch, so that’s that.
I am sorry I can’t see this in good faith, but I would need to see an attempt at how this is meant for curiosity’s sake and not propaganda.
I am on here a lot, I am a person. And this is what I think when I see the title. I am sorry for the bad vibes but I say no to Russia and learning Russian (for now).
I am okay with potential downvotes. I still think this needs to be said. I wish I could be above this but I can’t.
As a Ukrainian, seeing how US sometimes romanticizes Russia and takes active interest in its culture is heartbreaking. But I guess having an ocean between you and the continent with Russia does that to you.
My good friend once taught me that people without shame are the most dangerous people.
I am shocked by how much russian-speaking people are shameless.
When russia starts the biggest war since WWII using language/national justification¹, promoting russian culture is shameless beyond limits.
¹ putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" ("украинский вопрос" – an obvious reference to "Judenfrage" which later was used by German fascists to justify holocaust) when he announced his svo
Your comment is troubling. I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion). This is disturbing to me because i believe this is the kind of mental confusion that actually makes this kind of political violence possible.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
Colonization of eastern parts of russia involved forced conversion to christianity, violence, rape, mass murder, but not language extermination
Even culture extermination is an exaggeration, sure some areas got forcibly "converted" to christianity (if they were unlucky to be invaded before USSR) but you will see mosques/buddha statues/whatever is applicable and all the local traditions and beliefs mostly going like before
Actually in areas where local languages exist they kept schools teaching local languages and official signs are duplicated in both local and Russian all the way from USSR. I know this first hand;) but even the article you linked will tell you that.
So it was maybe not as good as support for indigenous languages in Canada but not extermination
Only since 2018 it is optional to teach local language in schools, previously there were at least some schools that teach it in every area like that. thank Putler for that too.
Entire history of Ukraine since russia became a thing is a constant struggle for preserving its own language.
Look at what happens now:
1. russia demands russian language to be declared official in Ukraine.
2. russia targets Ukrainian cultural institutions in its airstrikes, trying to destroy anything Ukrainian
3. first things russians do after occupying a territory is "reeducation" of Ukrainian-speaking representatives of the population and burning Ukrainian books
I can continue this list.
Seeing original post at times like this is genuinely confusing. But OTOH, many still choose to be wrong understanding russia's warv against Ukraine. pUtin explicitly said he intends to solve "Ukrainian question" once and for all.
as Lithuania - this is absolutely not true. Even before Soviet union the Russian empire was exterminating language to the point where there's an entire Lithuanian history chapter on Lithuanian book smugglers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers
Soviet empire wasn't better either. My great grandmother who was a Lithuanian language teacher was sent to Siberian gulags _for_ teaching Lithuanian. Luckily she survived and lived to a 100 just to prove these disgusting people wrong.
Russian is neither a common lingua franca nor is it commonly spoken by foreigners (with the obvious exclusion of former Soviet countries). It belongs culturally to Russia and it's people. English belongs to half a dozen countries.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
Is English commonly spoken by countries that aren't former British colonies? I am a Ukranian citizen, and if I can speak Russian, and not have that kind of prejudice, you should also be able to. In fact most Ukrainians speak Russian.
> Exactly that gives ruskies propaganda talking points to invade Ukraine by saying they don’t like how Ukrainians treated russian speakers.
The Russians have a point there. I wish the Russian language was an official language in Ukraine, and I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions, but unfortunately the Ukranian government chose to instead try and force people to speak Ukranian at school, etc. But that obviously doesn't justify starting a war.
> British King isn’t delusional enough to start war with neighboring English speaking country.
Do they even have a neighbouring country that speaks English? They are dumb enough to quit EU though.
The propagation of English is due to the influence of America and Britain. If you look at the history of what those two have been up to all around the world, it's not pretty.
I speak Russian and due to war I've completely abandoned the language and the culture. Russians not showing any resistance is a good litmus test whether culture is worth being involved with and the answer is a clear no imo.
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
I honestly do take pity on russians but I also chose to not engage with russian culture to sanitize my own environment as it's just too ruined for any healthy engagement.
Hence, the weak spot in Russia‘s age old decrying of „NATO-encroachment“: It is Russia‘s neighboring countries themselves that immediately sought NATO-membership
Ah yes all the freedom fighters and culture preservationists had zero impact in securing Lithuania's freedom - what an incredibly dumb, disrespectful and frankly depressing take.
depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.
also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.
As Russian many crazy supporters of Putin and Ukraine war I met outside of Russia are foreigners speaking English. Sure it's worse among Russians but if you were serious about anti war position you would want to speak Russian more because that helps spread your position. It's not like PRC yet, people can disagree with government without being so afraid
I could do the speaking but the letters are crazy. I was trying to learn it in college to impress this Russian chick. All I got was kak dela privjet.
I think it's crazy so many other countries learn English, I mean lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.
> You can, and should, speak Russian with a permanent broad smile
Funnily enough, I was told the exact same thing about English when I was learning it as a Russian native.
In contrast, see “Why Russians never smile”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27317859
Yeah, that's the point - you shouldn't really smile, it's about relaxing your mouth
On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.
Are we trying to make psychopaths? That’s sounds very unsettling for conversation.
Very funny and snobbish too, nothing less expected from Nabokov.
Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language. It is not that different from German in this matter.
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
You may find this interesting: https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
Difficulty scale looks about right.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
I find Mandarin Chinese a lot easier than Russian.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
Personally I find Vietnamese and Chinese to be about the same difficulty overall, just not on the same areas.
Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.
>It is not that different from German in this matter.
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
Define properly. As a native speaker who immigrated to the US decades ago, I don’t find writing proper Russian grammar that difficult.
> Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language.
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
Well, yes.
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
> Same thing with learning Japanese
Korean, too.
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Japanese is partially kanji, while Mandarin is 100% HanZi (kanji).
But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
I found after learning Greek I could instantly read Cyrillic too
Odd. According to this venn diagram, that would only give you 3 additional characters of Greek from what you would already know coming form English.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...
The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!
That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same: Λ Л Δ Д Κ К The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
Learned Greek alphabet on Duolingo in a month or two
After russian, other languages - georgian, hebrew, english seem reasonable. Especially hebrew.
Saying this as a native Russian speaker
Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
Best class I ever had!
This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
Sky-colour makes sense, but coffee drinking only goes back to the 15th century or so. Did Georgians not have a word for this colour before then?!
> you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color"
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
> "coffee-color"
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
Actually brown in russian it's "bark-colored". bark = кора. Корица (cinnamon) is diminutive
You can also use "кофейный" (coffee-coloured) as synonym for "brown".
That wouldn't be natural though. You would never describe, say, pants, as "coffee-coloured" in Russian.
Брюки цвета кофе is natural in Russian. Pretentious, but still natural.
"Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
"кофейного цвета брюки" is acceptable too.
I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
"кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
> "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
"кофейная чашка" meaning will be resolved according to context where it's used
Don't know japanese, but english been main language that i consume in past 25 years or so. i never saw it abused to same degree as russian gets abused
It’s fine as an occasional stylistic choice, but using it repeatedly as a regular synonym for brown is a pragmatic and collocational error. The meaning is clear, but the wording is marked, and overuse makes the speech sound odd in everyday contexts.
coffee color won't be synonym for brown. it will be distinct color, just like strawberry, raspberry, straw, ruby, etc colors.
It would make your Russian more posh, eccentric or sophisticated, depending on the context, but not necessary unnatural.
actually you will. "coffee color" it's distinct from brown. And then there is also "coffee with milk" color.
Won't be surprised if there is "pumpkin latte" color nowdays.
Uh huh. Don't forget "aliceblue" and "rebeccapurple." But seriously, those are just arbitrary marketing aliases, aren't they. I remember e-shopping for sneakers, and every brand's "off-white" was a different color.
I believe polish is similar. They have “sky color” which is pretty cool!
There are several Hindi words for brown, my favourite is "Badami" - almond-like.
My grandfather used "laal" which is usually used for red. I used to wonder if he was colour blind.
Colours are fun in many languages.
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
Japanese has a word for green now 緑 (midori). Traffic lights use the word for blue for historical reasons
I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct?
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
Romance languages have more verb tenses. I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
Not really. At least not for me. The vast assortment of tenses was somewhat surprising.
About English there is a Russian saying: "in english you write Manchester but you read Liverpool"
Well, just as Nabokov said: Russians have an impression that foreign languages are simpler than Russian.
Don't we all?
I have my own sample set as I presented.
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.
Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.
A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
>Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago.
I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?
Because Hebrew has been revived artificially.
it doesn't really diminishes my point
I am sorry, due to the war, I cannot see this in good faith. I am Dutch, so that’s that.
I am sorry I can’t see this in good faith, but I would need to see an attempt at how this is meant for curiosity’s sake and not propaganda.
I am on here a lot, I am a person. And this is what I think when I see the title. I am sorry for the bad vibes but I say no to Russia and learning Russian (for now).
I am okay with potential downvotes. I still think this needs to be said. I wish I could be above this but I can’t.
You are not alone in this my friend.
As a Ukrainian, seeing how US sometimes romanticizes Russia and takes active interest in its culture is heartbreaking. But I guess having an ocean between you and the continent with Russia does that to you.
Thank you for stating your position.
My good friend once taught me that people without shame are the most dangerous people. I am shocked by how much russian-speaking people are shameless.
When russia starts the biggest war since WWII using language/national justification¹, promoting russian culture is shameless beyond limits.
¹ putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" ("украинский вопрос" – an obvious reference to "Judenfrage" which later was used by German fascists to justify holocaust) when he announced his svo
Your comment is troubling. I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion). This is disturbing to me because i believe this is the kind of mental confusion that actually makes this kind of political violence possible.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
It's not "mental confusion" its a lived experience for millions of people.
Russia and Russians have a long history of exterminating local languages and culture in territories they control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
This is false.
Colonization of eastern parts of russia involved forced conversion to christianity, violence, rape, mass murder, but not language extermination
Even culture extermination is an exaggeration, sure some areas got forcibly "converted" to christianity (if they were unlucky to be invaded before USSR) but you will see mosques/buddha statues/whatever is applicable and all the local traditions and beliefs mostly going like before
Actually in areas where local languages exist they kept schools teaching local languages and official signs are duplicated in both local and Russian all the way from USSR. I know this first hand;) but even the article you linked will tell you that.
So it was maybe not as good as support for indigenous languages in Canada but not extermination
Only since 2018 it is optional to teach local language in schools, previously there were at least some schools that teach it in every area like that. thank Putler for that too.
This is false.
Entire history of Ukraine since russia became a thing is a constant struggle for preserving its own language.
Look at what happens now: 1. russia demands russian language to be declared official in Ukraine. 2. russia targets Ukrainian cultural institutions in its airstrikes, trying to destroy anything Ukrainian 3. first things russians do after occupying a territory is "reeducation" of Ukrainian-speaking representatives of the population and burning Ukrainian books
I can continue this list.
Seeing original post at times like this is genuinely confusing. But OTOH, many still choose to be wrong understanding russia's warv against Ukraine. pUtin explicitly said he intends to solve "Ukrainian question" once and for all.
> but not language extermination
as Lithuania - this is absolutely not true. Even before Soviet union the Russian empire was exterminating language to the point where there's an entire Lithuanian history chapter on Lithuanian book smugglers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers
Soviet empire wasn't better either. My great grandmother who was a Lithuanian language teacher was sent to Siberian gulags _for_ teaching Lithuanian. Luckily she survived and lived to a 100 just to prove these disgusting people wrong.
Sorry, my perspective is based on what happened within borders of Russia, I guess USSR was worse to white people who look more like russians
But how does this makes any sense? Do you refuse to speak English when USA (English speaking) invades Iraq? Or you are ok with double standards?
Ah, famous whataboutism.
Do they pay in rubles, or do you do this for free?
Russian is neither a common lingua franca nor is it commonly spoken by foreigners (with the obvious exclusion of former Soviet countries). It belongs culturally to Russia and it's people. English belongs to half a dozen countries.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
Is English commonly spoken by countries that aren't former British colonies? I am a Ukranian citizen, and if I can speak Russian, and not have that kind of prejudice, you should also be able to. In fact most Ukrainians speak Russian.
This is not true. Like literally factually incorrect.
Most people in big cities can speak russian due to russia's colonization strategy. But it's far from "most Ukrainians".
Saying this as Ukrainian citizen who has seen more Ukraine (both eastern and western parts) than just a few big cities.
Exactly that gives ruskies propaganda talking points to invade Ukraine by saying they don’t like how Ukrainians treated russian speakers.
British King isn’t delusional enough to start war with neighboring English speaking country.
> Exactly that gives ruskies propaganda talking points to invade Ukraine by saying they don’t like how Ukrainians treated russian speakers.
The Russians have a point there. I wish the Russian language was an official language in Ukraine, and I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions, but unfortunately the Ukranian government chose to instead try and force people to speak Ukranian at school, etc. But that obviously doesn't justify starting a war.
> British King isn’t delusional enough to start war with neighboring English speaking country.
Do they even have a neighbouring country that speaks English? They are dumb enough to quit EU though.
You're free to go to russia, where russian is the official language.
But I think you're already there, just trying to spread russian propaganda posing as Ukrainian
> Do they even have a neighbouring country that speaks English?
Ireland.
English is an official language in Ireland, so it is not like Ukraine.
The propagation of English is due to the influence of America and Britain. If you look at the history of what those two have been up to all around the world, it's not pretty.
I speak Russian and due to war I've completely abandoned the language and the culture. Russians not showing any resistance is a good litmus test whether culture is worth being involved with and the answer is a clear no imo.
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
I honestly do take pity on russians but I also chose to not engage with russian culture to sanitize my own environment as it's just too ruined for any healthy engagement.
I live in Baltics. It took 50 years and many dead people, but we got rid of them.
your liberation was a byproduct of the Soviet empire's collapse. your struggle and your dead had nothing to do with it.
Hence, the weak spot in Russia‘s age old decrying of „NATO-encroachment“: It is Russia‘s neighboring countries themselves that immediately sought NATO-membership
Ah yes all the freedom fighters and culture preservationists had zero impact in securing Lithuania's freedom - what an incredibly dumb, disrespectful and frankly depressing take.
depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.
also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.
Hahaha... Independent Kazakhstan. Good joke, comrade. Go spread your russian propaganda elsewhere
what exactly am I propagandizing here?
also, Путин - хуйло, Крым - Украина. happy now?
As Russian many crazy supporters of Putin and Ukraine war I met outside of Russia are foreigners speaking English. Sure it's worse among Russians but if you were serious about anti war position you would want to speak Russian more because that helps spread your position. It's not like PRC yet, people can disagree with government without being so afraid